Hurricane and tornado seasons are getting longer because of climate change. So is tax season.

The IRS granted extensions to taxpayers in seven states to file their taxes this year because of federal disaster declarations. Filers in parts of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi have until July 31 to submit forms and payments because of severe storm and tornado damage.

Those in certain areas of Alabama, California, and Georgia have until Oct. 16, because of winter storms, flooding, mudslides, and tornadoes. A winter storm in portions of New York means taxpayers there have until May 15 to make filings and payments.

“There’s this migration of fiscal deadlines occurring in the United States,” said Rob Moore, senior policy analyst for climate adaptation at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The Earth’s warming climate is altering everything from animal migration patterns to when plants bloom. It’s also changing when Americans file taxes: As severe storms and natural disasters worsened by climate change afflict broader swaths of the country, the IRS is issuing more extensions for individuals and businesses to cope with the fallout sooner and pay taxes later.

“I think about that every time a tornado rips through Mississippi when it shouldn’t,” said Caroline Bruckner, managing director of American University’s Kogod Tax Policy Center.

Since 2021, the IRS has postponed the April tax deadline for parts of 15 states with federally declared “major disaster areas.” It has granted relief for other tax due dates – including for quarterly tax – to parts of 27 states in the same period.

That means for millions of Americans, tax season is getting longer, and the country’s national tradition of a rush to the mailbox, or tax-filing software, is changing by the year.

All taxpayers are eligible for six-month extensions each year by filing a form before the April deadline and making an estimated payment. If that estimate is wildly incorrect, the IRS may charge a penalty and interest.

Disaster tax relief is different: Filers get at least 120 days more for filings and payments without penalty or interest. For more severe disasters, the IRS can provide even longer deferments. Taxpayers can also make delayed contributions to individual retirement accounts and health savings accounts.

That’s an important distinction for individuals, families, and businesses contending with the aftermath of a catastrophe, said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the Tax Foundation think tank.

Taxpayers should be focused on rebuilding their lives after disaster strikes, he said, not worrying about gathering paperwork in time for Tax Day. Extreme weather events can also destroy paperwork and records, rendering it impossible for affected taxpayers to comply with the deadlines.

“If you had a tornado tear through a county a few weeks before the filing deadline, you do not want people to choose between the extremely important decisions they have to make for their family at that moment and timely tax filing,” Walczak said.

The areas of the country that could be facing such a scenario are increasing rapidly, according to the latest climate research. More than 40% of Americans live in counties hit by climate disasters in 2021, The Washington Post found in an analysis of federal disaster declarations.

In 1980, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that natural disasters that caused an inflation-adjusted $1 billion worth of damage happened about once every four months. In 2022, they occurred once every three weeks.

“The risks are increasing no matter where we live,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, a leading global environmental advocacy group.

The threats, though, are not equally spread across the country, experts said. States around the Gulf of Mexico and the Mid-Atlantic are experiencing harsher hurricanes and tropical storms that research has linked to warming gulf and ocean waters. But because hurricane season falls between June and November, states hit by those storms often get disaster tax postponements only for some quarterly deadlines, not the April filing deadline, Bruckner said.

Western states contending with droughts and heat waves are also struggling with drier soils, said Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That can contribute to other destabilizing weather events with tax consequences.

The IRS cited wildfires in granting tax postponements to California residents in 2021, and New Mexico and Colorado residents in 2022.

Tornado Alley – once thought to consist of mostly Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas – is moving east, according to 2018 and 2022 research published in the journals Nature and Environmental Research Communications. Some studies attribute the shift to warmer air that holds more moisture, powering volatile storm systems.

Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi are prone to late-spring and summer tornadoes, Moore and Hayhoe said, but now stronger twisters are touching down earlier in the year. The IRS has granted parts of Tennessee extensions for the April tax deadline for three straight years, and for Arkansas and Mississippi, for two of the past three years. (Mississippi’s 2022 extension was due to the Jackson water crisis.)

“Things are kind of tilted more and more in favor of weather events that we would have once considered improbable,” said Moore.

Americans are widely adapting to living with the effects of climate change, experts say. Residents in traditionally cooler climates are installing air conditioning in their homes to cope with hotter summers. Vacation season is getting longer in some places, like beach towns, Hayhoe said, and shorter in others, like ski resorts.

Now tax prep is part of those changes, too. That means state and federal lawmakers may have to take up policies to help suffering families and businesses receive disaster tax deductions without having to wait to file a postponed return, Bruckner said.

The U.S. tax industry, built around giant software firms and volunteer tax prep clinics, is largely set up to serve filers between January and April. That means that taxpayers – especially low-income earners, Bruckner said – filing returns later in the year because of disasters often don’t have the same resources available as they would during the traditional tax-filing window.

“We have to talk about how climate change is affecting our taxes, our vacations, our homes, our jobs, our kids, our health,” Hayhoe said. “Every aspect of our lives is being affected.”

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